Women in Physics Canada Conference - 2011

What is the Universe made of? Recent observations suggest surprising results: not only most of the matter in the Universe is dark and unconventional but, more surprisingly, the major component of the Universe may be in the form of 'dark energy' -- a form of energy that opposes the pull of gravity and causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate. By combining recent observations of clusters of galaxies, distant supernovae, and the cosmic microwave background, we find evidence for a Universe that has only 5% 'normal' baryonic matter, 20% non-baryonic dark matter, and 75% 'dark energy'.

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of women in all academic levels in physical and applied sciences in Canada. Despite the modern feminist movement the number of women in physics continues to be less than the number of men, particularly in higher and leadership positions. As there is no rational reason for women to trail men in achieving new scientific discoveries or excel in academic teaching, the cause of this is attributed to existing gender biases in the perception and practice of science.

Physics Education Research (PER) is a blossoming subfield of physics that is changing the way students become physicists. Our research involves the transformation of the lab portion of a first-year enriched physics course through the implementation of “invention activities:” discovery-learning activities that ask students to “invent” a solution to a problem before being taught the expert solution.

A gel that has similar thermodynamic properties to human tissue is necessary for determining the safety of implanted medical devices during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). One particular gel recommended by the ASTM standard (F218209) is the polyacrylic acid (PAA) phantom. In this work, PAA mixtures were characterized by measuring viscosity (as a function of shear rate), electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and elastic and viscous moduli (as a function of frequency).

Molecular spectroscopy offers the tools and instrumentation needed to unveil the structure and characteristics of molecules that are found within planetary atmospheres. In order to do this we examine the frequencies of light that these molecules either absorb or emit. It is the fine structure of these absorption or emission features that give us information about their physical state.. In our lab we use a near-infrared source to probe various molecules and examine absorption features and their dependency on both temperature and pressure.

We are doing research on the chemical reaction of the hydrogen atom with water under sub- and supercritical conditions. Supercritical water is water above the critical point (373.9 C and 220.6 bar). This reaction is one of the most important reactions in the next generation of nuclear reactors called Gen IV, where supercritical water will be used as a coolant. We have been studying this reaction by the SR experimental technique.

The DEAP-3600 single-phase liquid argon detector at SNOLAB will increase the sensitivity to spin-independent WIMP-nucleon scatters by two orders of magnitude, allowing for the possibility of dark matter particle detection. The spherical detector will contain 3600 kg of liquid argon in an 85 cm radius acrylic vessel surrounded by 255 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). After a collision between a WIMP and an Ar-40 nucleus, the scintillation light from the recoiling nucleus will be collected by PMTs. The separation of background events from WIMP events is critical.

Study of rare decays is an important approach for exploring physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). The branching ratio of the helicity suppressed p ? e? decay, is one of the most accurately calculated decay process involving hadrons and has so far provided the most stringent test of the hypothesis of electron-muon universality in weak interactions.